HN Explorer

Ask HN: What would you do with massive, cheap incoming bandwidth?

3 points by wanderr ↗ HN
I work for a site that uses a terrifyingly huge amount of outgoing bandwidth. The thing is, bandwidth purchased at this scale is symmetrical, so we are only using 1% of the incoming bandwidth that we have access to.

If someone has a great business idea for how to take advantage of that inexpensive incoming bandwidth (remote backups?) this could be a decent opportunity. Could be a new or existing business.

For the record I'm not actually in a position to make business deals but I can certainly get the right people in touch.

4 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] thread
jiaaro
how about datamining services? lots of data goes in, only aggregated data goes out (much smaller)
byoung2
Isn't incoming bandwidth usually very cheap anyway? The problem is that you have to either store it or transfer it back out, which are both more expensive.
wanderr
It would make sense if it is, I imagine most services have an excess of incoming bandwidth for the same reason we do, we just have even more of it as a % because we serve bigger files. But yeah I have no idea what pricing for incoming bandwidth typically would be...
atomical
It's not uncommon. Datacenters will make deals with their customers. I ran a spider for some time off a 100 megabit connection. It was a shared connection which made it dirt cheap and they had a lot of spare incoming and it didn't bother them if I used it 24/7.